Monthly Archives: April 2025

Whitehead in McLuhan

[This post is a variation of McLuhan on Whitehead occasioned by a renewed engagement with Science and the Modern World and a forgetful head.] 

McLuhan first read Whitehead’s 1926 Science and the Modern World with Rupert Lodge in the early 1930s at the University of Manitoba. When he was teaching in St Louis preparing his PhD thesis, he reread it in the 1938 edition. Then, sometime in the 1940s, he read Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effects and Adventures of Ideas. All of these volumes are in his library preserved at the University of Toronto, sometimes in multiple copies and often annotated.

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McLuhan included the following Whitehead texts in The Medium is the Massage (1968):

Science and the Modern World, 1926
It is the business of the future to be dangerous…1

Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effects, 1927
The major advances of civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Adventures of Ideas,1933
In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.

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Here in chronological order are McLuhan texts where Whitehead is discussed (his numerous mentions of Whitehead are not included). Some commentary is given in footnotes.

The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time, 19432
Like Bergson, in full revolt against the long monopoly of Cartesian and Newtonian mathematical physics in the interpretation of the universe, Whitehead says that on the materialistic theory “there can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cried aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature. . . . The organism is a unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters of eternal objects, emerging for its own sake.” (Science and the Modern World, 1938, 130.) For the “forms” of Bonaventure, Whitehead substitutes “events.” “Events” are patterns of universal being.3 Mental cognition, he says, “knows the world as a system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as mirrored in other things” (174). The metaphor of the mirror comes as naturally to Whitehead as to Bonaventure, of whom Whitehead knows nothing. All specialism in knowledge disappears for Whitehead as for Philo or Hugh of St. Victor: “We can now see the relation of psychology to physiology and to physics. The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint.” (175). The difference between Whitehead and Bonaventure is that between a man taking his first uncertain steps into a new world of inexhaustible significance, and a man born into that world. The concepts in terms of which Whitehead falteringly apprehends his brave non-Newtonian world are crudely makeshift and tentative. Bonaventure’s are delicately and complexly poised, deftly touching his world at innumerable points.

Francis Bacon’s Patristic Inheritance, 1944
Whitehead’s concept of events, of nature as organism, and of mind as mirrored in other things puts him in an ancient tradition. (Cf. Science and the Modern World, 1938, 130)4

The Mechanical Bride, 1951
Professor Whitehead tells us in his Adventures of Ideas that whereas Newton gave us the picture of an atomic universe, Leibnitz “explained what it must be like to be an atom. . . . Leibnitz tells us how an atom is feeling about itself.”5

The Mechanical Bride, 1951
If it were possible to define success in a great number of ways, a success drive might not be destructive. If there were as many recognized kinds of success as there are temperaments, tastes, skills, and degrees of knowledge, a society dedicated to success might yet develop very great harmony amid variety and richness of experience and insight. As Whitehead put it in Adventures of Ideas: “The vigour of civilized societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worthwhile (,,,) All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worthwhile. Such personal gratification arises from an aim beyond personality.”6 

The Mechanical Bride, 1951
This artistic discovery for achieving rich implication by withholding the syntactical connection is stated as a principle of modern physics by A. N. Whitehead in Science and the Modern World. “In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life (…) my theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time.” Which is to say, among other things, that there can be symbolic unity among the most diverse and externally unconnected facts or situations.7 

The Mechanical Bride, 1951
A. N. Whitehead states the procedures of modern physics (…) in Science and the Modern World. In place of a single mechanical unity in all phenomena, “some theory of discontinuous existence is required”. But discontinuity, whether in cultures or physics, unavoidably invokes the ancient notion of harmony. And it is out of the extreme discontinuity of modern existence, with its mingling of many cultures and periods, that there is being born today the vision of a rich and complex harmony. We do not have a single, coherent present to live in, and so we need a multiple vision in order to see at all.8 

Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry, 1951
As A.N. Whitehead showed, the great discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that fact about nature, but the discovery of the technique of invention, so that modern science can now discover whatever it needs to discover. And Rimbaud and Mallarmé, following the lead of Edgar Poe’s aesthetic, made the same advance in poetic technique that Whitehead pointed out in the physical sciences. The new method is to work backwards from the particular effect to the objective correlative or poetic means of evoking that precise effect, just as the chemist begins with the end product and then seeks the formula which will produce it.9

Network #2, 1953
Edgar Poe’s Philosophy of Composition anticipated the technique of the modern sciences of physics, chemistry, archaeology and psychology. Poe discovered a new method of precision, economy and control in writing backwards.  To start with the effect and to invent the cause, to move from emotion to the formula of that particular emotion. This is what Whitehead in Science and the Modern World refers to as the discovery of the technique of discovery.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962
A most luminous passage of A.N. Whitehead’s classic Science and the Modern World is one that was discussed previously in another connection.10
“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention. A new method entered into life. In order to understand our epoch, we can neglect all the details of change, such as railways, telegraphs, radios, spinning machines, synthetic dyes. We must concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty, which has broken up the foundations of the old civilisation. The prophecy of Francis Bacon has now been fulfilled; and man, who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels, has submitted to become the servant and the minister of nature. It still remains to be seen whether the same actor can play both parts.” (Science and the Modern World, 141)11
Whitehead is right in insisting that “we must concentrate on the method itself.” It was the Gutenberg method of homogeneous segmentation, for which centuries of phonetic literacy had prepared the psychological ground, that evoked the traits of the modern world. The numerous galaxy of events and products of that method of mechanization of handicrafts, are merely incidental to the method itself. It is the method of the fixed or specialist point of view that insists on repetition as the criterion of truth and practicality. Today our science and [fundamentally different] method strive not towards a point of view but to discover how not to have a point of view, the method not of closure and perspective but of the open “field” and the suspended judgment. Such is now the only viable method under electric conditions of simultaneous information movement and total human interdependence.
Whitehead does not elaborate on the great nineteenth century discovery of the method of invention. But it is, quite simply, the technique of beginning at the end of any operation whatever, and of working backwards from that point to the beginning. It is the method inherent in the Gutenberg technique of homogeneous segmentation [although unknown and unacknowledged there]12 but not until the nineteenth century was the method extended from production to consumption.13 Planned production means that the total process must be worked out in exact stages, backwards, like a detective story. In the first great age of mass production of commodities, and of literature as a commodity for the market, it became necessary to study the consumer’s experience. In a word it became necessary to examine the effect of art and literature before producing anything at all.14 

We need a new picture of knowledge, 1963
A New Emphasis on Process: It was Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World that first drew wide attention to the close relations between art and science. (…) “We must concentrate on the method in itself; that is the real novelty which has broken up the foundations of the old civilization (…) One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product” 15 [by working backwards].

Alarums in a Brave New World, 1965
It was A.N. Whitehead who pointed out that one of the great sources of confusion in our time is the illusion that the environment is stable and that all change and innovation occur within this unchanging environment. This illusion is a legacy of the Newtonian system. This system had no more place for change than it had for people.

Relation of Environment to Anti-Environment, 1966
The scientists of our time are just as confused as the philosophers, or the teachers, and it is for the reason that Whitehead assigned: “they still have the illusion that the new developments are to be fitted into the old space or environment”.16

Francis Bacon, Ancient or Modern? 1974
A.N. Whitehead, while perceiving that Bacon “is outside the physical line of thought which finally dominated the century” has no way of clarifying his observation that: “Bacon’s line of thought (…) expressed a more fundamental truth than do the materialistic concepts which were then being shaped as adequate for physics.” (Science and the Modern World, London, 1938, p. 56) Quite simply. Bacon’s humanist and grammatical approach to the page of nature and the book of creatures makes for “a conception of organism as fundamental for nature” (Ibid., p. 130).17

  1. Whitehead continues here: ”and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.” ↩
  2. The Classical Trivium, 143-144, n32. ↩
  3. “Patterns of universal being” is first of all a subjective genitive, just as physical materials are first of all patterns of (= belonging to) the chemical elements. ↩
  4. The reference to Science and the Modern World 130 is from McLuhan. ↩
  5. The Mechanical Bride, 50. “How an atom is feeling about itself” may be understood from SMW 104: “The actual world is a manifold of prehensions; and a ‘prehension’ is a ‘prehensive occasion’…”. An atom is ‘aware’ of this “manifold of prehensions” simply by fitting into it. It ‘takes account’ of it at the fundamental level. If it did not, it would not ‘fit in’.  This atomic ‘taking account’ is what McLuhan calls “feeling about itself”. ↩
  6. The Mechanical Bride, 77. Taking the ‘I’ away from concepts yields percepts. ↩
  7. The Mechanical Bride, 80. If origin is plural (as polytheisms have always maintained), the borders (or middles or ‘media’) that are necessary to its plurality hold in “symbolic unity” the most powerful ontological forces — both together and apart. It requires relatively less power to exercise “symbolic unity among the most diverse and externally unconnected (ontic) facts or situations.” McLuhan often compared this original power to fission and fusion in physics: “Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.” (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954) ↩
  8. The Mechanical Bride, 96-97. ↩
  9. See Programming peace for survival. ↩
  10. That ‘other connection’ was earlier in The Gutenberg Galaxy, page 45, where McLuhan cited the same passage from of Science and the Modern World  (141), but included  a further sentence: “One element in the new method is just the discovery of how to set about bridging the gap between the scientific ideas, and the ultimate product. It is a process of disciplined attack upon one difficulty after another.” ↩
  11. The topic of  “the invention of the method of invention in Science and the Modern World” (141) was broached repeatedly by McLuhan in many other writings both before and after The Gutenberg Galaxy. Some of these were: ‘Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters’ (1954), ‘Media Alchemy in Art and Society’ (1958), ‘Technology, the Media, and Culture’ (1960), ‘The Electronic Age – The Age of Implosion’ (1962), Understanding Media (1964), ‘Is it Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another? (1967) and ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ in Through the Vanishing Point (1968). ↩
  12. As McLuhan concludes this passage from GG 276: “This is the literal entrance to the world of myth.” ↩
  13. ‘Consumption’: for example in any and all experience regarded as a ‘taking in’ of the external or internal landscapes. ↩
  14. Gutenberg Galaxy, 276. ↩
  15. The quotation is from Science and the Modern World, 141. ↩
  16. The same sentence with the same citation appears in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, an essay in Through the Vanishing Point, 1968. ↩
  17. The references from the 1938 edition of Science and the Modern World are from McLuhan. It is probable that most of this 1974 essay was written in the early 1940s when McLuhan was studying Bacon at SLU in the contexts of writing his own PhD thesis on Nashe and advising the PhD thesis on Bacon of Maurice McNamee. A St Louis Post-Dispatch story from August 10, 1997, ‘McLuhan’s Two Messengers — Maurice McNamee and Walter Ong’, recalled this time from more than 50 years before: “McNamee also had McLuhan as a dissertation director, and he soon found out just what the Canadian-born, Cambridge-educated ‘Mac’ meant by ‘direction’. ‘Mac’s directing of my dissertation consisted of coming into that building right over there, plopping himself down on the bed, and talking for three hours a night about his own studies’, McNamee said through a fit of laughter. ‘He was working on his own dissertation, but he encouraged me to use his methods on my work (on Bacon). So in the end, it was a perfect pairing’.” ↩

Innis’ Fur Trade volumes

Harold Innis’ Fur Trade first appeared in 1927. It was printed by OUP (Canadian Branch) for the University of Toronto Library and had 172 pages:

 

Three years later, a second enlarged volume with 444 pages and a slightly different title (in Canada rather than of Canada) was issued by Yale University Press in the US and OUP in England:

The preface to the 1930 Fur Trade by R.M. MacIver1 clarifies that the second volume was not simply an enlarged version of the 1927 edition (as is often reported). Instead, as MacIver writes:

The history of the fur trade here presented by Doctor Innis may be regarded as an introduction to the analytic study of that [contemporary] industry which appears in another volume, The Fur Trade of Canada (Toronto, 1927). The two volumes together are intended to give a conspectus of the industry, showing against the historical background the social and economic significance of the fur trade, the [historical] role which it has played and continues [contemporarily] to play in the general life of the country.

MacIver contributed a ‘General Preface’ also to the 1927 volume in which the same point is made:

The present study does not deal with the historical development of the industry. The history of the fur-trade, which has an important bearing on the whole process of settlement and exploitation of the Canadian West, is the subject of a separate work which Dr. Innis has prepared, and which will be published in due course.

And here is Innis himself in his own ‘author’s preface’ to the 1927 volume:

The following work is the first part of a study of the fur-trade, and is largely descriptive of the modern trade.

Innis then ends that preface, having addressed “the hopeless task of acknowledging obligations to those who have granted their assistance at various stages of the work”, as follows:

Perhaps more than all I have been indebted to Professor R. M. Maclver for his constant encouragement throughout the preparation of the work.

 

  1. Wiki: Robert Morrison MacIver (1882-1970) received degrees from the University of Oxford (B.A. 1907) and the University of Edinburgh (M.A. 1903, D.Ph. 1915). He was a university Lecturer in Political Science (1907) and sociology (1911) at the University of Aberdeen. He left Aberdeen in 1915 for a post at the University of Toronto where he was Professor of Political Economics and later Head of Department from 1922 to 1927. In 1927 he accepted an invitation from Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City, where he became Professor of Social Science from 1927 to 1936. He was subsequently named Lieber Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Columbia University and taught there from 1929 to 1950. (From the 1929 date and Toronto location of his Preface to Innis’ 1930 Fur Trade, it would appear MacIver taught at both Toronto and Columbia in 1927-29.) He was President, beginning in 1963, and then Chancellor of The New School for Social Research (1965–66). MacIver was Vice-Chairman of the Canada War Labor Board from 1917 to 1918. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He was a member of the American Sociological Society, and was elected as its 30th President in 1940. ↩

Programming peace for survival

We Need a New Picture of Knowledge, 19631

What I have been proposing in this essay is that it is no longer necessary to move from one model to another of the educational process2 as if we were following the higher dictates of some Hegelian disturbance in the emotional life of the Absolute.3 It is now possible to discern the structural features of the cultural situation that shaped the growth of the very special bias of Western consciousness. It is just as easy to discern the [structural features or] causes4 that shaped the bias of the Eastern mind.5 The [isolation and investigation]6 of all these [structural features or] causes is now within our grasp. We can deliberately pattern our cultures today by altering the mix of components with their attendant “closures” or effects7 [that result in] our outlook and desires and goals.8 For the goals of any culture are included in its initial structure exactly as the Polaris missile has its target built into it by gyroscopy.9 Any alteration of [that initial] structure [results in]10 a change of target. But since men do not choose [or ‘target’] to be missiles,11 their new awareness of [how to investigate the domain of experiential]  structure12 can be used to free them from the consequences of any one structure. We can now deliberately create total “field” situations which hold the usual structural consequences [like our endless wars] in abeyance.

As McLuhan already in 1951 pointed out in ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry‘:13

The new method is to work backwards from the particular effect [for example, genocide (which apparently nobody today in 2025 has any idea how to prevent or counteract)] to the objective correlative or (…) means14 of evoking that precise effect, [hence also of revoking it,] just as the chemist begins with the end product and then seeks the [elementary] formula which will produce it.15 

Similarly in Network #2, 1953:

Edgar Poe’s Philosophy of Composition anticipated the technique of the modern sciences of physics, chemistry, archaeology and psychology. Poe discovered a new method of precision, economy and control in writing backwards.  To start with the effect and to invent the cause, to move from emotion to the formula of that particular emotion. This is what Whitehead in Science and the Modern World refers to as the discovery of the technique of discovery.

And here he is in his 1969 Playboy interview:16

Our survival (…)17 is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies.

  1. In New Insights and the Curriculum, ed Alexander Frazier, 1963. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s essay appeared in the Yearbook of the National Education Association. Therefore the particular reference here to “educational process”. But his understanding of “educational process” was far broader than ‘school learning’. It was his view that all experience, without exception, is an “e-ducational process”, an ‘extensional’ bid to come to grips with the world, whose elements and their laws of combination it was his lifelong labor to attempt to isolate and investigate. Essential to such dis-covery was a revolution from diachronic or chronological time (“necessary to move”) to synchronic or ‘all-at-once’ time, so that McLuhan ended We Need a New Picture of Knowledge with this sentence: “In the electronic era (…) the real work of mankind becomes learning and teaching in a timeless process of exchange and enrichment by the human dialogue.” ↩
  3. This funny but obscure sentence may be translated as follows. Until now attempts to dis-cover the fundamental structure of human experience (aka, the “educational process” per note 2) have been unsuccessful (partly because of the difficulty implicated in the “educational process” of hunting for the fundamentals of the “educational process”). Various models have succeeded one another in haphazard linear sequence, “as if we were following the higher dictates of some Hegelian disturbance in the emotional life of the Absolute” — rather than pursuing that very human “educational process” which has led to the dis-covery of the elementary “structural features” needed to inaugurate sciences like chemistry. And the key to this change, in turn, is the flip from matching to making. See Preface to The Mechanical Bride: “provisional affairs for apprehending reality”. ↩
  4. McLuhan substitutes “causes”‘ for “structural features” here, apparently because — aside from a nod to Aristotle — he will shortly begin talking of “effects”. The basic idea is that once elementary “structural features” have been identified, so also, either in fact or in principle, will be their associated properties: cause and effect. On this basis, just as with chemistry, desirable properties like social harmony may be promoted and undesirable ones like genocide demoted. ↩
  5. The repeated “bias” here as the key to consciousness and mind is, of course, a tip of the hat to Harold Innis. As McLuhan wrote in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1964 reprinting of Innis’ The Bias of Communication: “Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures.” ↩
  6. For ‘isolation and investigation’ McLuhan has “control” ↩
  7. “Components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects” — compare ‘chemical elements with their attendant valences and other properties’. McLuhan’s claim is nothing less than that the perpetual dysfunctions of human being like war and genocide can now be investigated as properties or “effects” of structural elements that can uncontentiously be isolated and investigated. Hence his repeated claim that the central concern of his work was “survival”. ↩
  8. McLuhan has “components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects on our outlook and desires and goals”, not ‘that result in our outlook etc’. But his argument is exactly that “our outlook and desires and goals” are properties or effects of prior elementary structures and are not properly conceived as being already there for effects to be exercised on them. ↩
  9. With ‘gyroscopy’ McLuhan means ‘cybernetics’, which was developed during WW2 at MIT as an automated means of targeting. ↩
  10. McLuhan: ‘is’. ↩
  11. “Men do not choose to be missiles”: McLuhan might seem to be offering an uncharacteristic hope here rather than an observation. In point of fact, men, and women too, all too often do “choose to be missiles” and wish nothing more than to hurl themselves, with their explosive ‘payloads’, at children. But McLuhan did not at all mean to imply that the solution he proposed would turn on individual or collective choice. Instead, we human beings are affected and effected far more by the general environment than by any component of it including our wills: the medium is the message and the massage. Hence McLuhan earlier in this passage: “the cultural situation that shaped the growth of (…) Western consciousness”. So it will be, if we do not destroy ourselves first, that men and women will no longer “choose to be missiles”, not by the magical exercise of individual moral choice, but on account of the open investigation of human experience with its “chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us” (Playboy interview above) — and so, ultimately, by the altered world that that investigation will constellate. (Compare what has happened to the world since the discovery of the chemical elements beginning around 1800.) Hence McLuhan’s reference, concluding the lead passage above, to the “total ‘field’ situation which (will be able to) hold the usual structural consequences (like genocide) in abeyance.” ↩
  12. As illustrated by the existing sciences, the definition of any domain must include not only its elements but also the various ways by which they can be isolated and investigated. ↩
  13. In Essays in Criticism. 1:3, 1951, reprinted in The Interior Landscape, 1969. ↩
  14. ‘Means’ in 1951 will become ‘medium’ in 1958: ‘the medium is the message‘. In keeping with the subject of his essay, McLuhan has ‘poetic means’ here. But as he goes on in the same sentence to evidence, he saw the arts and sciences as mutually implicating. ↩
  15. “The elements and their formula” is what McLuhan in the lead passage above from ‘We Need a New Picture of Knowledge’ calls “the mix of components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects”. ↩
  16. Page 5 of the pdf. ↩
  17. Omitted here: “and at the very least our comfort and happiness”. ↩